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Friday, November 8, 2013

Author Interview: Dr. Glenn Shepherd, author of Not for Profit

Glenn Shepherd was raised on a farm in
eastern Virginia, went to undergraduate school at UVa on an academic
scholarship, and graduated in 3 years. There he lettered in wrestling four
years, was a pitcher in fast pitch softball
leagues from high school through his military tour of duty, and on into private
practice until fast pitch leagues were replaced by slow pitch softball. The
certificate he

values most is the award for being the pitcher on UVa's all Mad
Bowl team; also, his participation in the Army's south eastern regional finals
game.

He completed a surgery internship and
general and thoracic surgery residency at Vanderbilt, completed Plastic Surgery
Residency at Duke, and did a hand fellowship at the University of Louisville.
He spent two years in the Army at the Ft. Gordon Hospital and the Second
Surgical Hospital in An Khe Vietnam.

He entered the private practice of
plastic surgery in Newport News, Virginia and worked for 28 years before
retiring. For most of those years, he directed the Riverside Facial Anomalies
Clinic where with the help of numerous volunteer specialists in ENT,
Pediatrics, Oral Surgery, Orthodontics, Speech Therapy, Audiology and
Psychology, he treated 500 patients.

He was the director of the Riverside
Laboratory of Microvascular Research for 20 years where he financed and
participated in basic research in wound healing, cleft palate repair, nail bed
growth and repair, development of capsule formation in breast implants,
vascularization of the breast, and nail bed growth and repair. Numerous
scientific articles resulted from the research. Three awards were given by the
American Society of Plastic Surgery for this research.

He has been on the editorial staffs of
The Journal of Plastic Surgery, Journal
of Surgery Gynecology and Obstetrics, and the Virginia Medical Monthly.

He is the author of Not for Profit, the first in the Dr. Scott James thriller series. A
second project in the works is a biography of Barclay Sheaks, a great painter
who battles Parkinson's Disease and self-wills himself to a remarkable
come-back from the disease. He is currently writing a novel entitled Relief Aid, Haiti, which is in the Scott
James series, in which the plastic surgeon goes to Haiti to assist the surgical
load of a physician friend who lives there. The villain of Not for Profit, Omar Farok, plans a nuclear attack on America and
wants revenge for Dr. James' and Ethel Keyes' disruption of his earlier attack
on the US.

I recently conducted an email Interview
with Dr. Shepherd.

Who
are your influences?My chiefs of surgery, Dr. Scott at
Vanderbilt, Dr. Pickerell at Duke, and Harold Kleinert in Louisville influenced
everything I do. They taught that discipline and dedication are the backbones
of every successful undertaking in life. It's as important not only in
becoming skilled at surgery but in all things, whether it's learning golf for
the first time after one retires or writing a book.

When
did you begin writing?I wrote my first novel, SURGE, while a surgical resident at
Vanderbilt in 1969. I was inspired by Richard Hooker's book, MASH, which was published in 1968. I
used notes I wrote while working at the Second Surgical Hospital in Viet Nam
1964-65. There was little humor in my book as I dwelt on actual
happenings at the military hospital and the serious business of caring for the
injured in the early part of the war. The rigors of my training prevented
me from completing the book, but it stimulated my writing which I started again
with the book, The Hart Virus, a 1000
page manuscript that I finished in 1986. It picked up newspaper headlines
about the AIDS virus and I built a story based on my predictions of the
eventual outcome of the AIDS crisis. Again, my plastic surgery practice left
little time to pursue publication. In reading it now, I was surprisingly
accurate in predicting the course of the virus over the years. It became
outdated as did my book that followed, Faces
in a Bamboo Garden, a story about the Vietnam War. And there were three
other books that I wrote while I practiced medicine, The Crypt of St. James, Timeshare, and A Funeral inTexas. It
was not until I retired from plastic surgery practice that I had time to devote
to my books. With the direction of the author and writing teacher,
Richard Krevolin, I recently published Not
for Profit. and Relief Aid, Haiti
will be printed soon, hopefully in November.

How
do you come up with your stories, characters, character names, POV, etc?My stories all have come from newspaper
headlines. For example, my unpublished Hart
Virus came from the new at that time, HIV and its influences on the
perception of gays. Initially, there was a social stigma to AIDS that was
followed by acceptance of gays in society and led to the current day
integration into society, even to the recent legalization of gay marriages. Not
For Profit uses the news media hype about potential flaws in the non-profit
hospitals, combines it with the drones and their almost daily accomplishments
in the war on terror, and links this with the horror stories of terrorist
atrocities.

My characters are combinations of
people I've met, people I see in everyday life at the food market, on the
street corners, at restaurants, and everywhere I go. I am an observer of
people, which was important in my plastic surgery practice as well as in my
books. These characters are real to me, and I've used the "star" of
Not for Profit in four of my unpublished works. Detective Harris is a
person alive in me and was an old, wise professor in the Hart Virus. He also did "cameos" in several others of my
novels, as did many other of the people of Not
for Profit.

Do
you work from an outline?I always start with an outline, but my
characters drive the story. They decide themselves where they go and what they
do. I lose control of them. And so, I cannot be compelled to follow that
initial outline. My initial POV was third person, but the publisher, Paula
Munier directed the use of first person for scenes of the primary protagonist
and third person for other scenes.

Tell
me about your favorite scene in your novel.My favorite scene is the final
paragraph of the book. Dr. Scott James had spent his life creating beauty,
peace, and harmony only to have a quirk of fate mess it all up. The opening
paragraph of the book tells the mythological story of Orchis, who did wrong and
was punished by the gods by their tearing him to pieces. Orchis' father prayed
to the gods to restore him, but instead of bringing him back as a man, he was
transformed into an orchid.Orchids
references are used throughout the book to bind the diverging elements of the
book and the final scene describes Dr. James' vision of seeing the moth-like
shape of the Phalaenopsis orchids take flight and restore Orchis to a perfect
human body, just as Dr. James has done daily in his plastic surgery practice.

Can
you tell us a little about your writing philosophy?I am a story teller, as my artist
friend Barclay Sheaks told me often in my 50 year friendship. I spent
considerable time honing skills as a writer so people would be entertained by
my stories. But in this entertainment, I have interjected my personal ideas. In
the current book, I deliver my personal feelings about the high cost of
medicine and how some hospitals may have used their tax exempt status to
compete successfully with private enterprises, take the profits they reap and
buy more and more businesses, and build giant, hundreds of million dollar
corporations, and demand multi-million dollar salaries for the CEO's, all these
things adding to the hospital bills individuals and insurance companies have to
pay.A second philosophy I throw in is
the great benefits our country has from its successful drone operation.

A third idea I float is the horrors of
terrorism. Some have said I was too graphic in describing acts of
terrorism.But I say that when the
actual scenes of a terror attack are glossed over by a summary report of
numbers-numbers killed and wounded, the horror of the terrorist attack is lost,
as in the recent attack in Boston.I
have seen a few rare scenes filmed at the actual bombing sites immediately
after the attack-sights of bodies torn apart, of the pain and anguish people
suffered, the ripped apart bodies of the dead-but the media glossed over this
to protect our experiencing the actual bombing, and seeing the lack of drama in
the court room as these terrorists are tried.I did not shield my readers. They see the entire thing. I want them to
feel what I feel, and what I felt when I've treated victims in Vietnam and in
the emergency rooms of hospitals.I want
not to glamorize the terrorist philosophy but to demonize the terrorists.As with the few sexual scenes - Ethel Keyes
was a victim of sexual abuse in her foster homes. Giving sexual favors was the
only means this brilliant girl had of surviving in the London bowery.She was trapped by the terrorists.If she failed in her missions, she would
suffer horrible punishment. I had to show in this book the actual scenes to
take the reader along with her as she engaged in pleasurable and loving sex. To
have a "jump in bed, screw, and smoke a cigarette" does not show the
rehabilitation process that had to occur before her attitude toward sex was
changed.This is established in this
book and the triplet, Jump, Screw, and Smoke may well be appropriate for Relief
Aid, Haiti. Everything in my book has a purpose.I am not interested in the sensationalism of
sex and violence, but in building a basis for believable protagonists in future
books. I hope Dr. Scott James and Ethel Keyes have a lot of stories to tell.

Have
you ever tried writing in any other genres?No. All my writings have been in the
mystery genre. Rich Krevolin transformed my writing to the "thriller"
category by abbreviating the back stories and getting quickly to the action
sequences. Several hundred pages were trimmed from Not for Profit to make it move fast. In fact, the last 100 pages
move so fast that I have difficulty proof reading them. Even after reading the
book a thousand times, I still get caught up in the action and read so fast, I
overlook even obvious errors.

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About Me

With a profound interest in religion, liberal politics and humor, Dave began writing in high school and has not given up on it since. His first professional writing jobs came while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh when he was hired to create political cartoons for the Pitt News and to write humor pieces for Smile Magazine. Dave has worked in the newspaper industry as a photographer, in the online publishing industry as a weekly contributor to Streetmail.com, and was a contributing writer to the Buzz On series of informational books, and his story, The Bet in Red Dust, appeared in the Western online anthology, Elbow Creek. Dave’s science fiction novel, Synthetic Blood and Mixed Emotions, is available from its publisher, writewordsinc.com.
Dave currently resides in his childhood home in Toronto, OH with his beautiful girlfriend and his teenage daughter. He enjoys participating in local community events and visiting with his two adult children and his grandkids. Join the Facebook fan-page at https://www.facebook.com/Lupaschwartzmysteries.